Mike Scheidt: Friday, June 29

What scares the hell out of a doom-metal icon? Taking the stage solo with an acoustic guitar.

[SINGER-SONGWRITER] Mike Scheidt looks
glassy-eyed and a little wobbly, desperate for his first coffee of the
day, as he searches for a seat at the downtown Stumptown. Twelve hours
ago, he stepped off a plane, returning home from playing some
international festival dates with YOB, his long-running and critically
lauded doom-metal band. In a few short hours, he’ll fly to San Francisco
to jam and record with a new project featuring former members of the
avant-metal outfit Ludicra.

Although Scheidt is relieved to be home, when he’s asked about the events that inspired his first solo effort, Stay Awake (released this month on Thrill Jockey), a look of extreme anguish flashes over his heavily bearded face.

“I won’t get specific,” the 42-year-old says, tearing a chunk off a pain au chocolat.
“But I will say that sometimes things don’t go how you really, really,
really want them to. It’s a constant lesson in humility and a constant
lesson in how life is. I felt an intense need to process that and purge
it.”

Even without all the
details, learning that something painful inspired these new songs isn’t
surprising, especially when you dig into the lyrics (“This is the price
to truly live/ Is to watch it die and not turn away,” he sings on “The
Price”).

Dark themes are
normal in metal. What is shocking about Scheidt’s new record is his
chosen medium for this catharsis: quiet, humble acoustic drone-folk.

In truth, Scheidt has
been studying acoustic playing for years, starting with some lessons
from legendary Captain Beefheart sideman Zoot Horn Rollo (“I make a
point of letting people know I was his worst student”), and then
on-the-job training at a guitar shop in Eugene.

Unlike the Merle Travis-style finger-picking Scheidt learned in those days, the sound of Stay Awake
is full of slowly unfolding melodies and long, drawn-out chords over
which he reduces his usual furious growl for a wobbly tenor that cuts
deep. On “In Your Light,” he even affects a bit of falsetto, a nod, he
says, to his love of Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot.

It’s daring enough to
hear Scheidt, as he puts it, “tear my chest open and let it all spill
out” in such an unadorned fashion. But one gets a real sense of the huge
risk that he’s taking when you see him perform the songs live. At a
recent Mississippi Studios appearance, the burly, tattooed musician
looked so much more exposed (and smaller) than usual without a huge amp
stack and eardrum-crippling volume at his back.

“It felt like I was
skydiving without a parachute,” he says of his first time performing
solo, at the behest of another metal musician with acoustic
proclivities, Scott Kelly of Neurosis. “This music was born out of very
deep, personal pain; putting that in front of people was horrifically
frightening. It’s made me better as a musician, but every time I do it,
I’m scared to death.”